Site Mobile Navigation

How St. Louis Was Won

Missouri began the Civil War early: from the rancorous debates over the Compromise of 1850 to the ideologically driven violence spilling over the border in Kansas, its residents had long seen how disagreements over the future of slavery and westward expansion could easily spark armed conflict. But in the second week of May 1861, St. Louisans could imagine what the end of the Civil War might bring as well: after a bloody skirmish between Confederate sympathizers and federal troops in St. Louis, city leaders sought to instill a new order, one that would maintain the property rights of Confederate sympathizers while guaranteeing Union control of the city. Some called it victory; some called it occupation. With the perspective of 150 years, we might call it the beginnings of Reconstruction.

Tensions in Missouri had flared almost immediately after the firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for volunteers from all the unseceded states. Pro-Confederate Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson said the president’s request was “illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with.” On April 20, Confederate sympathizers seized the federal arsenal in Lexington, Mo., and then used those weapons to attack Free Staters across the border in Kansas. Their actions left the St. Louis arsenal the only store of weapons under federal control in the entire state, and one of the only arsenals left in a slave state with materiel not under the control of the Confederacy.

Because Missouri’s secession convention had rejected leaving the Union in March, the state’s pro-Southern activists devised ways to aid the emerging Confederacy under the guise of neutrality. For example, Jackson used the excuse of annual exercises to call up the state militia as a show of force against Unionist Missourians. Many of the soldiers were pro-Confederate, and they dubbed their camp at Lindell’s Grove, just outside St. Louis, Camp Jackson. But many, particularly those drawn from the state’s large German immigrant community, were staunchly pro-Union, and they were shocked to find themselves lined up against their neighbors.

Library of CongressRepresentative Frank Blair

On the other side, resistance to Jackson and the pro-Southerners was readied in breweries and turner halls, in secret meetings gathered around private stocks of rifles. This shadow military was led by Representative Frank Blair, brother to Lincoln’s postmaster general. Blair recruited hundreds of enthusiastic immigrants, many of them veterans of the German democratic revolutions, to help defend the federal arsenal, much to the delight of the newly installed commander, Nathaniel Lyon.

Once again, Missouri displayed its mixed allegiances: Jackson, the duly elected governor, prepared to lead the official state militia out of the Union, while Blair, the duly elected congressman, sought to provide federal weapons to a fervent but as-yet-informal military force marching without uniforms, to orders shouted out in German.

As the state and federal forces gathered separately, eyeing each other suspiciously, another group of men, women and children acted in response to the outbreak of war. St. Louis’s free blacks swarmed the courthouse, seeking to file freedom bonds and receive state-issued licenses, to formalize their status as a hedge against kidnappers, bent on re-enslaving all they could. Missouri’s freedom bond law had been on the books since 1840, but it was mostly honored in the breach; only dramatic events like the Mexican War and now the firing on Fort Sumter led free men and women to find sponsors and file the necessary paperwork. In all, 334 of the 1,080 extant bonds from St. Louis were signed during the last two weeks of April 1861 — about half as many as had registered in the preceding 18 years. In the midst of militia maneuvering, free African Americans understood the opening of the war as a clarion call.

Library of CongressRaising the American flag over Camp Jackson. CLICK TO ENLARGE

On May 10 Gen. Lyon’s troops, loyal elements of the militia and Blair’s German volunteers — 8,000 men all together — marched through the streets of downtown St. Louis to surround the 1,200 state militia men gathered at Camp Jackson. They passed St. Louis High School just as classes got out, and many curious teenagers joined the onlookers. “Everything was oppressively silent, nothing being heard but shuffling of feet,” one later recalled. In the crowd that day was William Tecumseh Sherman, with his son; the next day, Ulysses S. Grant, at the moment a retired Army officer and failed St. Louis farmer, would go to the arsenal to hear what had happened from Lyon, a fellow West Pointer.

Lyon’s troops had Camp Jackson surrounded by 3:30 p.m. His officers demanded that the militia commander, Gen. Daniel Marsh Frost, surrender. While Frost called the order “illegal and unconstitutional” and Lyon’s action an “unwarranted attack,” he felt it best to comply with the demands. As Frost instructed his officers and their troops on how to be taken into custody, onlookers packed close for a better look. The lines became confused; some of those assembled blended into the crowd, while others began shouting “Damn the Dutch!” (“Dutch” being a term for German immigrants, corrupted from “Deutsch”) and cheering Jefferson Davis.

When the Union flag was hoisted over Camp Jackson, shots rang out, into the crowd and from it; so tight were the streets that Lyon was knocked unconscious by a kick from a fellow officer’s horse. In the crossfire and confusion, regiments fired toward each other around a bend in the road; officers frantically tried to stop the shooting. It was over within minutes, but 30 people lay dead, with twice as many wounded.

Was the skirmish at Camp Jackson a Confederate surrender with a bloody aftermath, or a Union attack on innocent civilians? Two versions spread rapidly through St. Louis and the divided nation, argued in newspapers and private letters, in questions of loyalty and suspicions of treason.

Related

In the weeks following, the state militia and federal arsenal commanders came to an agreement to keep the peace, maintaining separates spheres of influence in the state. But on June 11, a final meeting between Jackson and Lyon could not prevent the reopening of hostilities; getting up to leave, Jackson declared, “this means war.” Union forces took the state capital in June, and Jackson declared Missouri a free republic in August, seceded from the Union and ready to join the Confederacy. While Jackson, his government-in-exile, and other Confederate sympathizers regrouped in southern Missouri, Unionists vacated the state offices and appointed provisional replacements.

St. Louis, though, kept the uneasy peace. German troops found it so calm that they spent their time debating the finer points of Schiller with their prisoners. Indeed, that summer, while St. Louisans built fortifications against a Confederate attack, they also began to remake their city into a federal stronghold. Over the following years it became a critical administrative center for the Western Theater; shipyards built riverine ironclads and hospitals treated thousands of soldiers wounded in Tennessee and elsewhere. African Americans also prospered in the city, using the opportunities of war to establish schools and aid societies. And in August 1861, from his headquarters in St. Louis, Gen. John C. Frémont would attempt to use the threat of seizing and freeing slaves as a military strategy; Abraham Lincoln overruled him, only to come around to the idea the following year with the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

While Unionists expanded their influence and their confidence in St. Louis, Confederate sympathizers saw only stark choices: abandon their property to fight for their beliefs or learn to live under the watchful eye of the provost marshal’s office, in a society dominated by Republican thinking. St. Louis in 1861 bore a strong resemblance to the balance of power nationally during Reconstruction, when Northerners, Southerners and Westerners, black and white, had to find ways to integrate new policies with local traditions. The Civil War was years from over, but for St. Louis, its resolution began that afternoon in May 1861.

What's Next

One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.